Last Friday Thomas and I had a good intense meeting with Sudhanshu discussing the literature we will use to support our framework. We will meet with Sudhanshu again Thursday and Friday to finish up the sharp edges in sync with our framing, context and discourse of our research. More about that later on.
This Friday we will also join Sudhanshu in presenting his next course on cand. merc. dat. this spring, "IT Innovation in Emerging markets; Challenges for Development". The course has a lot of similarities to the course Thomas and I had with Sudhanshu last fall but it has been changed from a 7,5 to a 15 ETCS course and thereby obviously expanded. We will mostly elaborate on what we learned from the previous course and why we find the topics covered interesting. Our master thesis topic is of course a direct consequence of what we learned and experienced so we can only recommend this course in order to learn something completely different about ICT that most courses on cand. merc. dat. doesn't offer. It is ICT framed in a different context discussed through various discourses.
Furthermore we have been invited to participate in a workshop this Monday on ITU. Two graduate students from ITU are working on a project regarding porting and re-designing a Computer Based Functional Literacy (CBFL) program towards mobile technology. It is going to be very interesting since we frame our master thesis differently. We are trying to circumvent the necessity of becoming functional literate in order for ICT4D to succeed. This doesn't mean though that we think that initiatives such as (CBFL) programs are superfluous. Hopefully there is a potential for both concepts to coexist and thereby complement each other for development through ICT.
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
Thursday, 23 October 2008
Literacy or literacies?
Again we haven't had much to write about on the blog the last couple of weeks and both been busy with work, reading and some of the many administrative tasks which pops up when you are trying to go in India and Bhutan for 1½ month, especially on the financial aspects.
As the headline suggests we have moved on from the ICT4D literature and have focused on the aspects of literacy and illiteracy. As with ICT4D the literature is scattered if you are trying to pinpoint exact literature on literacy, development countries and potential benefits in combining these. Our hypotheses is that literacy is not required for development and that illiterates can develop without first acquiring competences in reading and writing. We don't object against schooling and literacy but just don't see a deterministic link between literacy and development. This is what we are trying to search for in the academic literature currently in order to shape our theory properly. The headline just suggests some of the main discussion in ethnographic and anthropological circles regarding literacy. It literacy a unique thing and/or ability or does it all depend on context/culture and so on?
Next to reading about literacy we are also in the process of shaping our theory for ICT4D and proposing a framework. With more than 60 articles and some books on the subject this is a rather time consuming task. From all of our summaries of articles and books we have now extracted and coded specific statements and will combine these to a framework. Tomorrow we will meet with Sudhanshu for a hopeful enriching discussion that properly will continue next week too.
Our field study to India and Bhutan is also getting more concrete. Right now it seems like we will leave for India right after new year and spent a couple of weeks there before moving on to Bhutan. The big question still is whether we can raise enough funds required but our first application for funds was sent this week to the Oticon Foundation so we hope for support from them. Hopefully others will continue in the next coming weeks.
I promise you that next time Thomas will write a very long and exiting post. He has been working on it for weeks now. I know that I'm looking forward to it :-)
As the headline suggests we have moved on from the ICT4D literature and have focused on the aspects of literacy and illiteracy. As with ICT4D the literature is scattered if you are trying to pinpoint exact literature on literacy, development countries and potential benefits in combining these. Our hypotheses is that literacy is not required for development and that illiterates can develop without first acquiring competences in reading and writing. We don't object against schooling and literacy but just don't see a deterministic link between literacy and development. This is what we are trying to search for in the academic literature currently in order to shape our theory properly. The headline just suggests some of the main discussion in ethnographic and anthropological circles regarding literacy. It literacy a unique thing and/or ability or does it all depend on context/culture and so on?
Next to reading about literacy we are also in the process of shaping our theory for ICT4D and proposing a framework. With more than 60 articles and some books on the subject this is a rather time consuming task. From all of our summaries of articles and books we have now extracted and coded specific statements and will combine these to a framework. Tomorrow we will meet with Sudhanshu for a hopeful enriching discussion that properly will continue next week too.
Our field study to India and Bhutan is also getting more concrete. Right now it seems like we will leave for India right after new year and spent a couple of weeks there before moving on to Bhutan. The big question still is whether we can raise enough funds required but our first application for funds was sent this week to the Oticon Foundation so we hope for support from them. Hopefully others will continue in the next coming weeks.
I promise you that next time Thomas will write a very long and exiting post. He has been working on it for weeks now. I know that I'm looking forward to it :-)
Tuesday, 7 October 2008
Experiences with MyC4
In Thomas' post regarding the international financial crisis and its impact on development he mentioned the micro finance initiative www.myc4.com. I agree with Thomas that the financial crisis will have impact on the development in developing countries. It is difficult to predict how much but nonetheless micro initiatives can be a way to help circumvent some of the problems that can arise.
MyC4 raises capital for African entrepreneurs, and in doing so strives to become a significant tool in the fight to end extreme poverty. The goal is to create sustainable prosperity in Africa via the Internet, and the mission is to remove barriers such as excessive interest rates that keep people in poverty.
MyC4 was inspired by the Nobel Prize winner, Professor Mohammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Grameen Bank provides credit to the poorest of the poor in rural Bangladesh without any collateral. Since 1983 the bank has provided micro credit to 7.45 million borrowers, 97% of whom are women, covering more than 97% of all villages in Bangladesh.
Jonas Toppenberg, Thomas and I worked with micro finance and used MyC4 as a case study during the "IT, Institutions and Development" course last fall. We analysed different aspects of it and what is important to remember is that their approach is business and not charity. But business for both parties in a reasonable fashion also referred to as social business. In my opinion this also makes the initiative sustainable. Too often you see of course well-meaning NGO's go in and do charity work but when they leave again everything falls apart, sometimes even for the worse. Sustainability is the keyword when you strive for development.
I've been actively investing on MyC4 since January 2008 and have gained a average interest at 12.4%. This is much more than you get on domestic inbound loans in Denmark. This means it is good business for me. For the African entrepreneur it is also good business. Local loaning in Africa sometimes reach an interest at 50 or 60%. This seem crazy for us Westerners but you have to consider the risk about loans. So giving the African entrepreneur a loan at the current average interest rate at 12.8& p.a. is good business for everybody (Please notice that some start up cost is not included here and the annual percentage rate becomes higher, but everything is very transparent if you look at the investment opportunities on their website).
As of today 8,025 investors from 74 countries have invested €4,750,061 in 2,859 businesses in 6 African countries. 90.2% of these businesses are successfully repaying their loans on time.
Personally I've gotten all repayments so far, not always in time, but eventually. I'm definitely not a large investor (I'm still a student you know) but even small amounts can do a difference.
Now some would say that saving up money like this will not help on the domestic situation at home in Denmark since we need to keep the wheels turning domestically first of all. Spend money here to keep employment up and so on. I agree on that but still you can do some reasonable business and help African entrepreneurs also. Everything is not black or white.
Others would say that people living in rural districts of Africa will not gain from this, only urban entrepreneurs that already have a business going. Rural poor people will be excluded and the divide will become larger. I don't pretend that MyC4 is the perfect and only solution to fight poverty and I think their mission of ending poverty with 2015 is a bit to optimistic. But we also have to remember that entrepreneurs needs employees and when they expand, they create more opportunities for others. Bangalore in India is a good example of this. The contrasts are tremendous but still they have somehow succeeded in integrating the global and the local networks and the international and national companies there knows they need the local population for all kinds of supporting jobs so they are heavily investing in improving the situation for the poorest locals. The same pattern can hopefully be seen in Africa and on a larger scale. We are all dependent on each other and we must create sustainable opportunities to fight poverty globally.
If you have any experiences yourself with MyC4 or other micro finance, please bring forward your comments. I know several of you readers are actively investors on MyC4 :-)
MyC4 raises capital for African entrepreneurs, and in doing so strives to become a significant tool in the fight to end extreme poverty. The goal is to create sustainable prosperity in Africa via the Internet, and the mission is to remove barriers such as excessive interest rates that keep people in poverty.
MyC4 was inspired by the Nobel Prize winner, Professor Mohammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Grameen Bank provides credit to the poorest of the poor in rural Bangladesh without any collateral. Since 1983 the bank has provided micro credit to 7.45 million borrowers, 97% of whom are women, covering more than 97% of all villages in Bangladesh.
Jonas Toppenberg, Thomas and I worked with micro finance and used MyC4 as a case study during the "IT, Institutions and Development" course last fall. We analysed different aspects of it and what is important to remember is that their approach is business and not charity. But business for both parties in a reasonable fashion also referred to as social business. In my opinion this also makes the initiative sustainable. Too often you see of course well-meaning NGO's go in and do charity work but when they leave again everything falls apart, sometimes even for the worse. Sustainability is the keyword when you strive for development.
I've been actively investing on MyC4 since January 2008 and have gained a average interest at 12.4%. This is much more than you get on domestic inbound loans in Denmark. This means it is good business for me. For the African entrepreneur it is also good business. Local loaning in Africa sometimes reach an interest at 50 or 60%. This seem crazy for us Westerners but you have to consider the risk about loans. So giving the African entrepreneur a loan at the current average interest rate at 12.8& p.a. is good business for everybody (Please notice that some start up cost is not included here and the annual percentage rate becomes higher, but everything is very transparent if you look at the investment opportunities on their website).
As of today 8,025 investors from 74 countries have invested €4,750,061 in 2,859 businesses in 6 African countries. 90.2% of these businesses are successfully repaying their loans on time.
Personally I've gotten all repayments so far, not always in time, but eventually. I'm definitely not a large investor (I'm still a student you know) but even small amounts can do a difference.
Now some would say that saving up money like this will not help on the domestic situation at home in Denmark since we need to keep the wheels turning domestically first of all. Spend money here to keep employment up and so on. I agree on that but still you can do some reasonable business and help African entrepreneurs also. Everything is not black or white.
Others would say that people living in rural districts of Africa will not gain from this, only urban entrepreneurs that already have a business going. Rural poor people will be excluded and the divide will become larger. I don't pretend that MyC4 is the perfect and only solution to fight poverty and I think their mission of ending poverty with 2015 is a bit to optimistic. But we also have to remember that entrepreneurs needs employees and when they expand, they create more opportunities for others. Bangalore in India is a good example of this. The contrasts are tremendous but still they have somehow succeeded in integrating the global and the local networks and the international and national companies there knows they need the local population for all kinds of supporting jobs so they are heavily investing in improving the situation for the poorest locals. The same pattern can hopefully be seen in Africa and on a larger scale. We are all dependent on each other and we must create sustainable opportunities to fight poverty globally.
If you have any experiences yourself with MyC4 or other micro finance, please bring forward your comments. I know several of you readers are actively investors on MyC4 :-)
We are still here...
Its been more than 1½ week since we last blogged and there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. We have become quite disillusioned with our master thesis and Thomas has decided to fulfill a childhood dream and take up a job at the counter at a fast food restaurant and I will pursuit a career as a professional football player :-)
Well, not quite true though :-) We are actually still very happy about how our master thesis are going but there just hasn't been much to blog about. It's as simple as that.
We have now read more than 60 articles mainly regarding ICT and development and their conjunctions but also theory about development in general and information systems. At this point we have started to categorize and keyword every article to easily match them together to form a theoretical web of references. This is still in the initial phase. Furthermore we have moved on to read about literacy and illiteracy and dichotomous assumptions in this field. This is important since we must understand the people in the context in which we intend to come up with a conceptual idea for ICT4D.
Lat Tuesday we spend the entire day with Jonas Toppenberg, a friend of ours from CBS, who is also writing his master thesis right now in a topic not so far from ours. He doesn't focus on ICT and development countries but on knowledge sharing in professional and non-professional networks. We had a good time talking about the summer vacation and discussing our master theses.
Unfortunately there is no news about our field study in India/Bhutan but our professor is due back from India this week and hopefully he will bring good news with him. We are still very optimistic about going.
Our current work cycle is still reading a lot of literature, writing summaries and discussing the theoretical and methodological approaches they propose. We are beginning to see a red line through a lot of out literature so our own theory is coming on strong. In our heads that is. It will be on paper later on :-)
Well, not quite true though :-) We are actually still very happy about how our master thesis are going but there just hasn't been much to blog about. It's as simple as that.
We have now read more than 60 articles mainly regarding ICT and development and their conjunctions but also theory about development in general and information systems. At this point we have started to categorize and keyword every article to easily match them together to form a theoretical web of references. This is still in the initial phase. Furthermore we have moved on to read about literacy and illiteracy and dichotomous assumptions in this field. This is important since we must understand the people in the context in which we intend to come up with a conceptual idea for ICT4D.
Lat Tuesday we spend the entire day with Jonas Toppenberg, a friend of ours from CBS, who is also writing his master thesis right now in a topic not so far from ours. He doesn't focus on ICT and development countries but on knowledge sharing in professional and non-professional networks. We had a good time talking about the summer vacation and discussing our master theses.
Unfortunately there is no news about our field study in India/Bhutan but our professor is due back from India this week and hopefully he will bring good news with him. We are still very optimistic about going.
Our current work cycle is still reading a lot of literature, writing summaries and discussing the theoretical and methodological approaches they propose. We are beginning to see a red line through a lot of out literature so our own theory is coming on strong. In our heads that is. It will be on paper later on :-)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
